Finally, a significant detour — it took almost
five years to complete it, but this is probably the most major stylistic shift
for Newcombe ever since he'd abandoned shoegaze and contemporary dance rhythms
in favor of recreating the hypothetical mindset of post-pool era Brian Jones.
The album title itself is indicative of the change: My Bloody Valentine were a
larger influence on the BJM circa Methodrone
rather than in the past decade, and The Velvet Underground were always a huge
influence, but more formally than substantially — «drone» being a major link
and all, yet up to now Newcombe had largely bypassed the Velvets' penchant for
reckless, abrazive experi­mentation, «ugliness», and «nastiness».

Time for rethinking that abstinence. For years
now, Newcombe has had his own record label, titled The Committee To Keep Music
Evil, and yet neither of his previous two albums seemed like they were perfectly
in touch with that name. Now, armed with some particularly hard drugs and
additional stipulations (like no talking whatsoever in the studio), Newcombe
seems bent on finally bringing his music in line with that name — or at least,
the song titles, the first one of which alone could have earned him a wanted
poster from millions of Beatle fans, had he at least a one thousandth share of
recognition of Heather Mills' husband. Not that the song title has any­thing to
do with the song's lyrics or the song's music — it's just a gratuitous swipe,
you know, to keep the music evil.

Of course, the basic BJM principles have not
really changed. The main modus operandi
remains as simple as it used to be: one midtempo musical idea per song, looped
and whipped mercilessly unto self-extinction. But now the focus is on making
these ideas nasty and funky, rather than limp and somnambulant. Suddenly the
junkie flips a switch, and his vibes are no longer wasted and dis­sipated
somewhere in outer space, but sharpened, poisoned, and directed right at you. This still does not excuse the
album's awful length (almost 80 minutes in total), but somehow it makes it
easier to sit through it without swallowing your tongue or locking your eyelids
than through quite a few of BJM's much shorter records.

The «meat» of the album lies in its dark,
distorted, grumbly, repetitive epics: ʽWho Cares Whyʼ, ʽAuto-Matic-Faggot For
The Peopleʼ (oh, that title), ʽDark Wave Driverʼ, and especially ʽMon­key
Powderʼ with its particularly eerie rising-and-falling bass groove. If you
think they sound like a cross between classic Hawkwind and classic Sonic Youth,
you are most likely right: and unlike either of these bands, Newcombe is
perfectly willing to disallow even minor
bits of variation as the groove grooves along, what with his well-known
aversion to «musical development» within any given musical track. Yet somehow,
this «dark ambience» seems more tolerable and even more sensible than the «limp
ambience» of past albums — maybe because of the relative fresh­ness of the
approach, or maybe because the deep bass riffs of the grooves make deeper
impres­sions and make you feel like you're walking along a treacherous, creepy,
but vaguely exciting path, rather than just making your way through an endless
irritating field of hemp.

Naturally, even this does not last forever: the
album has its fair share of obvious missteps, such as the solo piano piece ʽWe
Are The Niggers Of The Worldʼ, whose fairly strong title should at least
suggest depths of sorrow or heights of anger — instead, it sounds like somebody
trying to ape one of Keith Jarrett's improvisation styles (and not doing a
complete suckjob, actually, but some­thing tells me this piece was far from
improvised, which makes all the difference). And while the concluding piece,
ʽBlack Hole Symphonyʼ, shows that Newcombe has progressed far enough in his
mastery of electronics to be able to produce at least one awesome sonic loop
that does remind you of black holes, looping it for ten minutes really means that
he is aware that you can shut it off any second. And the funniest thing is, regardless
of the outcome, Newcombe wins — if you shut it off prematurely, he has
manipulated you into getting angry, and if you do not, he has manipu­lated you
into getting stupid.

But I am still closing my eyes on this and
giving the album a thumbs up, if only for one of the most genuinely
weird tracks produced in the decade — by accident, no doubt, yet even so ʽLjós­myndirʼ
(ʽPhotographsʼ in Icelandic) is as simple as it is baffling: a minimalistic
soundscape of cold ambient synthesizers, over which are scattered echoey pieces
of Icelandic babble. It does look silly on paper, yet for some reason I find it
strangely more enchanting than your average BJM limp-groove, and if it is some
sort of Newcombe-tribute to the magic island that gave us Björk, Sigur Rós, and
Eyjafjallajökull, the man has captured its essence in one stroke. Which only
makes it so much more frustrating to realize how much of that natural talent he
has wasted over intellectual conceptualization and, let us be frank, conceptual
castration of his ideas. Yes, the man got talent to burn — but then most of it
gets burned over drugs or over intentional creative lazi­ness that gets
presented as the next step in artistic vision. Go figure.

1 comment:

You're more generous to this album than I am: I see it as an early attempt at something the band does better on "Aufheben" and "Revelation." The deliberately offensive song titles that do not connect to the music or lyrics just seem lazy to me. They're "evil" only in the sense that sloth is one of the seven deadly sins.